Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation

A post from the Register (note - strong language) is touting Facebooks slowdown.

Facebook has suffered its first drop in monthly users, according to numbers from web analytics outfit Nielsen Online.

Five per cent fewer people in the UK visited the site in January compared to the previous month. A total of 400,000 seem to have become bored with the social network and didn’t bother to return.

Hmmmmm…if this is accurate and  continues, it will be interesting and see what is next.

In a post on the Community Guy blog - there is an interesting discussion about hire community focused people:

Question - via …well… many people over the years
How do I hire a community manager? Where do I post job openings?

Answer:
These days, that’s the 10 million dollar question! The reason I created the Community Guy Jobs Board is that I had regular requests from people for help finding community minds.

In a post from Boing-Boing:

pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission. So even though Ford has a lineup of enthusiasts who want to show off their Ford cars, the company is bent on alienating them.

Wow - this seems crazy to me, but then I think…do newspapers and broadcast stations do the  same thing?  Or at least similar.  Why wouldn’t we want people to take the content and push it out to more people.  Wouldn’t that build more audience, trust and community for product as a whole?

My first thought when I saw this was - you’ve got to be kidding.  But after reading this post by Sam Lawrence over at Jive Talks called 5 things online community strategists can learn from American Chopper.

1. Geek out on your products in public
2. Be real
3. If it doesn’t work, build something else
4. Show us what’s cool
5. Trust people who don’t work at your company

Check out the comments after the jump…good stuff.

If you watch the beginning of this video, Ron Paul explains that his fund raising efforts are not being directed by “his people” - it is a grass roots group of people working in his behalf.

If we could do the same thing with newspaper and broadcast websites - we too could be champions of community.  We need to figure out our message and stick to it.

There are so many posts about how young people give away too much information about themselves with social networking and user generated content sites.

The amount of data collected by services like Facebook and MySpace is immense. At no point in history has so much personal information and content been aggregated and shared in the fashion that these types of services make possible. Online privacy has been a hot-button issue for some time, but the evercreepier assaults on privacy (like Facebook’s Project Beacon) have created ever-stronger calls for more online privacy laws and protections.

While I really think people have to be conscious about what they post, but I think we really have to try and understand that the younger generations are not like old ones. These dudes and dudettes have grown up being more expressive and are OK with information being available.

Sometimes there is something to be said for people who have full transparency - it’s the old concept of the devils I do know about are better than the devils you don’t know about!

Is quarterlife’s Heat Cooling Off? is a post from NewTeeVee and sort of plays off quarterlife as an internet flop.

It’s easy to blame the promotion your show receives, but when your playcount drops from nearly 650,000 on YouTube for the first episode to just a little over 19,000 for the second episode, your problems go beyond marketing. People just aren’t coming back.

While I agree - the numbers are not what I thought they may be…but I would also call attention to a similar video project called “lonelygirl15“.  Check out these stats:

Videos Watched: 9,239
Subscribers: 99,886
Channel Views: 13,424,198

And these are only the YouTube numbers…at the lg15 website - it is probably more.

If I remember it correctly - the videos were out a while before they caught on…so who knows.  Maybe it just takes some time for the momentum.

I blogged about the IPTV show quarterlife earlier this month and it starts on Sunday.  I’m not sure when I will get to see it - but I am very excited about the community.

I’ve been really interested in how communities form and grow on the web.   They have done a great job on the site and it seems like there will be some very cool an innovative ideas started.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Jason K sent me this link the other day - “You can’t get there from here - Why mainstream media is way up a creek…”

Jason was asking if I thought he should share it with the newsroom - thinking it may freak them out or whatever…and my first reaction was “send it to them”, thinking it would se them off adn makethem think.

Then, I read the article again - and I was like “send it to them”, but for a different reason…to show them what these people are thinking.

But my real question/problem is I’m not sure if I get it. I just have a hard time thinking “people” or “the community” would report news if the media organizations were not involved. Do you really think Joe Shmoe would report on something - do we really think the community is that strong?

I just don’t see it - I would love to hear or find an example to compare this to…any thoughts?